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This Ever-Being is realized when upon examination of an object
I am able to say- or rather, to know- that in its very Nature it
is incapable of increment or change; anything that fails by that
test is no Ever-Existent or, at least, no Ever-All-Existent.
But is perpetuity enough in itself to constitute an Eternal?
No: the object must, farther, include such a Nature-Principle as
to give the assurance that the actual state excludes all future
change, so that it is found at every observation as it always
was.
Imagine, then, the state of a being which cannot fall away from
the vision of this but is for ever caught to it, held by the
spell of its grandeur, kept to it by virtue of a nature itself
unfailing- or even the state of one that must labour towards
Eternity by directed effort, but then to rest in it, immoveable
at any point assimilated to it, co-eternal with it, contemplating
Eternity and the Eternal by what is Eternal within the self.
Accepting this as a true account of an eternal, a perdurable
Existent- one which never turns to any Kind outside itself, that
possesses life complete once for all, that has never received any
accession, that is now receiving none and will never receive any-
we have, with the statement of a perduring Being, the statement
also of perdurance and of Eternity: perdurance is the
corresponding state arising from the [divine] substratum and
inherent in it; Eternity [the Principle as distinguished from the
property of everlastingness] is that substratum carrying that
state in manifestation.
Eternity, thus, is of the order of the supremely great; it proves
on investigation to be identical with God: it may fitly be
described as God made manifest, as God declaring what He is, as
existence without jolt or change, and therefore as also the
firmly living.
And it should be no shock that we find plurality in it; each of
the Beings of the Supreme is multiple by virtue of unlimited
force; for to be limitless implies failing at no point, and
Eternity is pre-eminently the limitless since (having no past or
future) it spends nothing of its own substance.
Thus a close enough definition of Eternity would be that it is a
life limitless in the full sense of being all the life there is
and a life which, knowing nothing of past or future to shatter
its completeness, possesses itself intact for ever. To the notion
of a Life (a Living-Principle) all-comprehensive add that it
never spends itself, and we have the statement of a Life
instantaneously infinite.
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